Postloyalist passages

About this book

Moving beyond the chronology and geography of the nation, postloyalism proposes a different analytic framework with respect to modern Chinese literary and cultural studies. Postloyalism throws into relief trajectories in space and mind, passages in texts and time, as well as connections between individual and community that might otherwise have been obscured. This study of postloyalism in Chinese literature by select writers from colonial Taiwan focuses on how the traditional, the center, the orthodox, and indeed the loyalist continue to be summoned and reinvented so as to justify the call to change in times of trouble and perplexity. This study also provides a vigorous consideration of the traditional and the modern, and how other binary logics clash in literary and cultural productions in varied contexts and locales. Literary works by select postloyalist writers and their lived experiences provide new angles from which such issues as history and memory, diaspora and homecoming, nostalgia and amnesia, loyalty and betrayal can be studied anew. Their postloyalist passages claim not the end of loyalism but the ever thriving realities of loyalist practice in modern-day Chinese literature and culture. Chapter one examines the writings of traditional-style poetry and history by Qiu Fengjia and Lian Yatang through which the two writers refigured various loyalist archetypes in the wake of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chapter two analyzes how loyalist and postloyalist writings become synonymous in dialectal writings during the 1930s. Chapter three examines new-style Japanese poetry by Wang Baiyuan and Jiang Wenye. The two lyric poets' journey to Japan and China reveal that if indeed postloyalist writers from colonial Taiwan must endure a close examination of national allegory, then the political and ideological must not be discussed without prudent mediation and meditation of the lyric. The fourth chapter explores the imbrications of host and guest, a recurring theme in the work of a Hakka writer Zhong Lihe. Known as the Chinese gypsies, the Hakka embodies the continual contestation between homeland and alien land, between migrants and natives, and between loyalists and postloyalists.